Feasibility Study of Security Virtual Appliances for Personal Computing

概要

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Computers connected to the Internet are a target for a myriad of complicated attacks. Companies can use sophisticated security systems to protect their computers; however, average users usually rely on built-in or personal firewalls to protect their computers while avoiding the more complicated and expensive alternatives. In this paper we study the feasibility — from the network performance point of view — of a VM configured as an integrated security appliance for personal computers. After discussing the main causes of network performance degradation, we use netperf on the host computer to find the network performance overhead when using a virtual appliance. We are mainly concerned with the bandwidth and the latency that would limit a network link. We compared the bandwidth and latency of this integrated security virtual appliance with current market products and in both cases, the performance of the virtual appliance was excellent compared with hardware counterparts. This security virtual appliance for example allows more than an 80Mbps data transfer rate for individual users, while security appliances generally allow only 150Mbps for small office users. In brief, our tests show that the network performance of a security virtual appliance is on par with the current security appliances available in the market; therefore, this solution is quite feasible.